Former Aide: Kill the White House Press Briefing

White House press secretary Jay Carney waits to call on a questioner during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Monday, July 22, 2013.

Reid Cherlin is a former White House assistant press secretary whose desk was in a part of the West Wing known as “upper press” – home to President Barack Obama’s press secretary and communications director.

So, he was plunk in the middle of the Obama communications shop.

For a couple of years Mr. Cherlin played a role in one of the White House’s best known rituals: the daily press briefing. He would help prepare talking points for then-White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. Afterward, he would often witness the briefings from the staff’s perch in a bank of seats near the podium.

Turns out he’s not a fan. Indeed, Mr. Cherlin said it’s time to do away with it.

“The daily briefing has become a worthless chore for reporters, an embarrassing nuisance to administration staff, and a source of added friction between the two camps,” Mr. Cherlin writes. “It’s time to do the humane, obvious thing and get rid of it altogether.”

Mr. Cherlin makes clear the reporters are sending their share of “pointless” questions the press secretary’s way (he cites one question about the congressional picnic). But he also takes the position that what the press secretaries are dishing up is pretty empty.

In his tenure, Mr. Cherlin worked for both Mr. Gibbs and the incumbent press secretary, Jay Carney. The two men “differ in style,” he writes. “Gibbs often made me cringe by ignoring the talking points; Carney makes me cringe by using them – but the effect is the same, which is to say, ridiculous.”

Never wanting to upstage the president, roil the markets or embarrass himself on camera, the press secretary has little scope for making news.

In the hours before the daily briefings, Mr. Cherlin said he would sit in the press secretary’s office “as other aides paraded through to offer their ‘guidance’ on whatever was in the news, which usually meant how to skate away without giving up much information.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt would invite reporters into the Oval Office for chats around his desk. We’re not likely to return to those days. But Mr. Cherlin mentions an alternative: Less formal, untelevised “gaggles.”

Turning off the TV cameras would “cut down on the circus tricks,” Mr. Cherlin writes. He added that “it would also leave the network people with less b-roll for their segments, but they’d live.”

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